A famous row on 23rd Street of four-story townhouses with large front gardens known as London Terrace and a similar row of two-story townhouses on 24th Street known as Chelsea Cottages, both designed by Alexander Jackson Davis in 1845, were demolished to make way for this gargantuan, 1,670-unit, full-block apartment project, which was completed in 1930.

The history of the site is wonderfully described in a well-illustrated chapter in Andrew Alpern's superb book, "Luxury Apartment Houses of Manhattan An Illustrated History" (Dover Publications, 1992).

Captain Thomas Clarke bought part of the Somerindyke farm in 1750 and named it Chelsea after part of London in his native England and built a "snug harbor" that he called Chelsea House, Alpern relates.

The building was destroyed in a fire in 1776 but the property stayed with his family and the house was rebuilt by his widow. Their daughter, Charity, inherited it and "added it to the holdings of her husband, Benjamin Moore, the Episcopal bishop of New York and president of Columbia College and in 1813 they ceded it to their son, Clement Clarke Moore, who wrote the poem that begins "'Twas the Night before Christmas."

Moore joined with James N. Wells, a local real estate broker, to develop the block with wood-framed, two-story houses on 24th Street for "working people" and 36 "grand brownstone row houses, all set well back from the pavement behind hedges and trees. "Each dwelling was designed in the popular Greek Revival style, creating a uniform vista of three-storied pilasters and recessed spandrels with Greek key carving." The 23rd Street row was called London Terrace.

Moore died in 1863 but Alpern wrote that his estate was not settled until 1907, a year of financial panic that marked "the beginning of the original London Terrace's decline" and soon many of the townhouses were subdivided into rooming houses and apartments and some were "thrown together as institutions."

The block was acquir...